After Oracle bought data-management platform and exchange BlueKai last February, it essentially split the company in two.
The Oracle Marketing Cloud reaped the benefits of BlueKai’s DMP while BlueKai’s Audience Data Marketplace formed the basis of the Oracle Data Cloud.
Still, there’s overlap.
“We have a very rich history with these two lines of business working closely together, and we still do,” said Pieter De Temmerman, VP of the Oracle Data Cloud. “Clients who are plugging their first-party data into our stack can also leverage the third-party data we bring to the table and, from there, create lookalikes, which is meaningful for marketers who may have a very low volume of high-quality converters.”
Oracle Data Cloud has linked up with several third-party data marketplaces including Dun & Bradstreet, MeritDirect and Madison Logic, to boost its data exchange offerings.
“We launched data-as-a-service (DaaS) for marketing, which relied heavily on the BlueKai Data Marketplace acquired by Oracle, and then we launched the same for other enterprise roles such as sales and now we’re coming to market with DaaS for customer intelligence,” De Temmerman said.
While ad networks and exchanges already access Oracle BlueKai’s audience data marketplace, Oracle also is enabling marketers to plug in and combine first- and third-party data through a customer intelligence platform.
De Temmerman spoke with AdExchanger about the Oracle Data Cloud.
AdExchanger: How else are you using BlueKai data?
PIETER DE TEMMERMAN: The integration at this point goes beyond the DMP. We’re integrated into a lot of marketing automation solutions and email providers, where we can leverage our data-as-a-service solution for different use cases.
We can plug specific email lists directly into Responsys, and other campaign execution systems and enable a marketer to target potential customers with the right message, for instance.
BlueKai’s system really helps us understand what consumers are doing online – it shows a lot of behavioral data. Our customer intelligence platform lets you understand what they’re saying, so we’re now ingesting, for example, data from 40 million social interactions and extracting value so we can understand what customers are talking about. Wearing my BlueKai hat, this applies not only to social data, but what we might call first-party data (like call logs or transactions).
What’s the role of the Data Cloud?
The Data Cloud was formed within Oracle to focus on making data accessible to enterprises for many different use cases. Previously, at BlueKai, we were looking to leverage data for marketing purposes specifically, but we’re branching out and looking at how can we enable business intelligence or data science teams or sales teams at enterprises to use that rich data.
How have you expanded that data set?
We brought our own data asset to market that’s powered by a number of strategic B2B providers like Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), MeritDirect, Madison Logic and about a half dozen others. We really focused on getting good scale and quality of data, which is why we partnered with these B2B data providers.
The focus … at BlueKai [has primarily been] collecting anonymous data for marketing on our BlueKai Audience Data Marketplace, and now to create this new data-as-a-service offering, we’re accessing data [from more than 240 million companies and 100 million professionals] from a partnership we announced with D&B last September.
You’ve continued to invest in the data marketplace. Will this a trend continue, following LinkedIn’s acquisition of Bizo?
Because we’ve kept such a neutral position at BlueKai, the market has really helped us, even throughout the shifts competitively in the landscape, and we expect that to continue. There are lots of traditional data companies like Nielsen [with eXelate], or like Acxiom, who are trying to protect the core concepts they’ve built up over the last however many years and reinvigorate that for the modern age, which is about being connected and leveraging data anywhere.
How does buying in to a B2B data marketplace help you at Oracle?
B2B data is very high-performing data. Enterprise companies frequently collect very high-quality data, and the fact that there’s some consolidation there doesn’t surprise me. We worked with most of these companies pre-acquisition and we still do. It helps in a few important areas – it helps to scale the amount of B2B data that’s standardized on a specific set of attributes I think the industry is interested in.
We see new partners emerging, so it’s helping us get global reach, which is great. Madison Logic has a data asset around B2B demographic data, for instance, but also B2B intent data. Madison Logic’s found a way to track business professionals who are in market to purchase a product or service, so it’s exciting to branch out from B2B demographic data, and see what you can do with all the intent data.
Who benefits from B2B data?
Some B2B companies are just … discovering lookalike audiences or correlation scoring to find additional audiences they can include as part of their marketing or CRM database.
We’re also seeing more B2C companies leveraging the B2B data asset as well. It’s always been a very high indicator of consumer intent if someone has a very senior role at a large company because it’s typically indicative of disposable income, and enables those people to buy a lot more products for their own use. We’re seeing more B2C companies looking at B2B demographic data.
